December 14th: the primacy of health for people’s quality of life

When you ask people what matters most to them, or when you confront them with trade-offs, or when you analyse who says they have a good life, or indeed, you look at the “revealed preferences” of the electorate, all of these analyses tend to point to the same, critical factor: health. Most of the econometric analyses I’ve seen (e.g., here) suggest that around half of the explainable variation in people’s satisfaction with their lives is determined by their health status.

I thought it would be nice to illustrate this with some data from the World Values Survey, which has asked people in 83 countries questions both about (subjective) health status and (subjective) life satisfaction. Today’s chart pivots the data in two different ways. The panel on the left shows, for each life satisfaction score (rows; 1 = Completely dissatisfied; 10 = Completely satisfied) what proportion of (population-weighted) respondents were in each self-reported health status category.

The good news is that, across the 140,000 respondents, only around 7% said they were either in “Poor” or “Very poor” health. But these people were also disproportionately likely to say their life satisfaction was very low. Indeed, people in poor, very poor or fair health made up around 60% of all of those who said they were “Completely dissatisfied” with their lives. [Of course, there will be many interconnected issues here to do with education, incomes, employment, etc., all of which contribute to health, and to all of which health contributes.] In contrast, only 25% of those “Completely satisfied” with their lives said they were in poor, very poor or fair health.

The right hand chart pivots the data in another direction, showing how satisfied people in each health category are. Of course, we see the same pattern, but the numbers here, too, are telling. Around 40% of people in the “Very poor” health category rate their life satisfaction between 1 and 3 — extremely low. [The global average life satisfaction in this data is around 7.2 and the standard deviation is 2.2.] At the other end of the spectrum, only 5% of people with “Very good” health rate their life satisfaction to be below 4.

While I believe better health to be a fairly universal need, the distributions point to one clear conclusion: to reduce misery (i.e., people who consider their lives very unsatisfactory), it is important to improve health (especially, to move people from the “Very poor” health category to something better).